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Ethnography and World
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465
AN43CH29-Hart ARI 12 September 2014 7:4
INTRODUCTION
There is much talk today of a financial and economic crisis comparable to that of the 1930s.
With the threat of a currency war and the euro’s collapse looming, the specter of the Great
Depression’s bloody aftermath has returned with a vengeance. Several versions of what a human
being should be and how to build society coexisted during the Cold War, when much of the world
won independence from colonial empire. Yet, discussion of humanity’s growing interdependence
is now limited to a one-world capitalism driven by finance. What have anthropologists to say
about that? It would seem very little. However, a positive case can be made for the discipline’s
contribution to public debate. We make such a case here.
We review recent developments in the anthropology of money and finance, listing its achieve-
ments, shortcomings, and prospects, while referring back to the discipline’s founders a century
ago. Economic anthropologists have tended to restrict themselves to niche fields and marginal
debates since the 1960s. We hope to reverse this trend by focusing on money’s role in shaping
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global society and bringing world history into a more active dialogue with ethnography.
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Money and finance have been prominent in anthropology since its formation as a modern
discipline. The economists emphasize what money does—a medium of exchange, reserve fund, or
means of accounting—but anthropologists can approach it as an integral part of the hierarchies
and networks of exchange through which it circulates. Its multiple meanings, in turn, keep society
together and reinforce the roles played by each member. Money’s capacity to transcend group
boundaries drives the extension of society to more inclusive levels and transforms identities in the
process. It is commonplace for our discipline to show that money’s meanings and relations cannot
be confined to a single theory.
Fieldwork-based ethnography—a commitment to joining the people where they live to discover
what they do and think—was the principal achievement of twentieth-century anthropology, but it
is insufficient for studying money (Hart 1986). The ethnographic revolution eventually removed
world history from twentieth-century anthropologists’ repertoire. This is hardly conducive to
the task of investigating money’s global role in our historical moment. Progress in economic
anthropology depends on combining ethnography and world history within a critical perspective
(Hann & Hart 2011).
So our trademark research method reaches a limit when we try to understand money’s global
circulation today. Anthropologists should be aware of developments in relevant outside disciplines
and of contemporary currents of world history that shape how we think. In terms of money, this
means having some knowledge of the history of monetary economics and a perspective on global
finance. If the new ethnography of finance is to throw more than superficial light on society, we
must transcend the categories that shape media discussions of the “crisis” and try to understand
our shared human predicament as a moment in the history of money. We need new methods if we
wish to account for how money underpins social identities and relations of conflict, hierarchy, and
interdependence in the world we are making today. This review proposes some of the tools needed,
drawing first on classical authors who combined openness to ethnographic discovery with a global
vision of economic history in their times and then on contemporary anthropological research.
First, we consider the main social theories of money a century ago, when it was seen to shape
the constitution of nation states, capitalist bureaucracy, and colonial empire. Karl Marx, Georg
Simmel, and Max Weber aspired to develop a general theory of money, whereas Marcel Mauss
and Karl Polanyi emphasized money’s multiple meanings. The latter were thus able not only to
account for a variety of monetary arrangements, but also to avoid thinking of history in teleological
terms and to embrace money’s plasticity as a tool for social transformation.
Second, we assess anthropologists’ achievements since the 1980s. Not only has money come
to be seen in a more constructive light, but its variability has also been widely acknowledged.
With one or two notable exceptions, however, anthropologists have found it hard to link their
detailed ethnographic accounts to world history in the longer run. Some still restrict their analyses
to observable situations, whether these be personal interactions or organizational spaces such as
offices and street markets. Even when anthropologists highlight the political relevance of their
findings, they do not directly study global flows of money or their historical context. A few address
the larger picture, but they tend to do so from on high without ever touching the ground, thereby
repeating the grand theory model whose limitations are well-known.
In our concluding section, we identify some moves that may help anthropology to illuminate
money’s role in constituting world society today. Nostrums inherited from the Cold War era,
such as neoliberalism, Marxism, or postcolonial theory, will not do the job. If anthropologists
were to recognize money’s potential to transform both world society and each of us, we could
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contemplate the future as well as the past and present. We will not get far as isolated individuals
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or by denying the need for interdisciplinary collaboration. However, harnessing the example of
inspiring ancestors to contemporary possibilities is a good place to start.
medium of exchange and standard of value. In a long footnote, Mauss held out for a broader
conception:
On this reasoning . . . there has only been money when precious things . . . have been really made into
currency—namely have been inscribed and impersonalized, and detached from any relationship with
any legal entity, whether collective or individual, other than the state that mints them . . . One only
defines in this way a second type of money—our own. (Mauss 1990 [1925], p. 127n)
He suggested that “primitive” valuables are like money in that they “have purchasing power and
this power has a figure set on it” (Mauss 1990 [1925], p. 127n). He also took Malinowski to
task for reproducing the bourgeois contrast between commercial self-interest and the free gift, a
dichotomy that many anthropologists have subsequently attributed to Mauss.
One of Mauss’s key modifications to Durkheim’s legacy was to conceive of society as a historical
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project of humanity whose limits were extended to become ever more inclusive. Society could not
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be taken for granted as a preexistent form. It must be made and remade, sometimes from scratch.
Gift exchange pushes the limits of society outward. “The whole intertribal kula is merely the
extreme case . . . of a more general system. This takes the tribe itself in its entirety out of the narrow
sphere of its physical boundaries and even of its interests and rights” (Mauss 1990 [1925], p. 36).
Mauss (1990 [1925]) was enthusiastic about the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific,
but he held that money and markets were human universals, whereas Malinowski (1921, 1922)
went out of his way to oppose the kula ring to both. The impersonal economic forms found in
capitalist societies were recent inventions, according to Mauss. They shared the world with many
other ways to use money, even in Europe and North America, and were bound to be transformed in
the future. For him, the socialist movement from below and the development of social protection
in Europe were part of this process (Mauss 1990 [1925]).
Mauss’s financial journalism, particularly concerning the exchange rate crisis of 1922–1924,
accounts for a fifth of his published political writings (Mauss 1997, Hart 2014), but he generally
maintained a firewall between politics and his academic work (Fournier 2006 [1994], Hart 2007).
He broke this rule only once, in the concluding chapter to The Gift. An example of how far he
was prepared to go politically may be found in an unpublished paper, “A Means of Overhauling
Society: The Manipulation of Currencies” (Fournier 2006 [1994], pp. 212, 390n105), where he
claims, with a strong echo of Keynes, that the great economic revolutions are “monetary in nature”
and the manipulation of currencies and credit could be a “method of social revolution . . . without
pain or suffering”:
It suffices to create new monetary methods within the firmest, the narrowest bounds of prudence.
It will then suffice to manage them with the most cautious rules of economics to make them bear
fruit among the new entitled beneficiaries. And that is revolution. In this way the common people of
different nations would be allowed to know how they can have control over themselves—without the
use of words, formulas or myths. (Mauss, quoted in Fournier 2006 [1994], pp. 212, 390n105)
Mauss argued for a pragmatic understanding of the human economy that would be of use to people
in their daily lives. Nearly a century later, we draw inspiration from him for a similar argument
(Hart & Maurer 2009, Hart et al. 2010).
of modern social theory. Among those who did, Marx, Weber, and Simmel stand out. Marx
(1977 [1869]) was the first economist to recognize the centrality of machine production to the
modern economy. For him, what matters in our societies are people, machines, and money, in
that order, but money controls the machines and through them most workers. His early slogan,
“workers of the world unite” (Marx & Engels 1987 [1848]), showed how to reverse that situation.
Unlike the antimarket left (and his Stalinist successors), Marx (1973 [1858]) put money at the
center of any complex society, both actual and potential (Nishibe 2005). An apparently neutral
instrument of exchange among equals in liberal theory, money also acts as a “fetish,” both hiding
and articulating hierarchical relations between the owners of the means of production and the
workers they exploited (Marx 1977 [1869]). This insight underpinned a vision of relations and
forces of production in history that would soon lead to the whole world being overtaken by
capitalist expansion. Marx’s anthropology was largely a retrospective exercise emphasizing how the
movement of resistance he and Engels built would become the horizon of all humanity (Hart 2013).
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In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel (1978 [1900]) sought to make sense of money as part of a
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neo-Kantian project aiming for a society of equal and independent individuals. Money allowed
for individual expression of desires and, thus, for the social constitution of autonomous subjects.
Yet it worked as a measure of value only because people could count on others to accept it,
so money transcended the individual. Simmel identified money’s twin anchors as its physical
substance (coins, paper) and the community of its users, which is an invisible third party to all
transactions. He predicted that the first would wither away, thereby revealing money’s social
character; indeed, it is a symbol of our human capacity to make universal society. As capitalism
and colonialism expanded, money would dialectically unite the world through common standards
of measure, provoking a general recognition that all participants are intrinsically equal. This in
turn would give rise to a more just distribution of money than was possible under capitalism.
Simmel, following Hegel, understood the present as a historical moment that would be surpassed
by its own teleology.
Weber did not engage with world history as teleology, but his analytical categories closely
reproduced the moral vision of neo-Kantianism. For him, the origins of modern capitalism lay in
a religious revolution, the Reformation, whose cultural premises had an affinity with the need of
business enterprises for rational calculation (Weber 2003 [1904–1905]). He was also aware of the
intimate links among bureaucracy, states, and capitalist firms (Weber 2013 [1922]). Yet, whether
the discussion was of Chinese peasants or Protestant entrepreneurs, the personality structure of
his ideal types does not change over time or between places. A subject always exercises free will
in relation to different values through three types of action—habitual, affective, and rational—
that limited what Weber’s (1978 [1920]) sociology can account for. Money does not occupy a
distinctive position in this sociology; in general, it is a means of exchange that depends on trust
between the participants. Thus, Weber’s historical analysis of capitalism does not support a vision
of an alternative future for humanity, but rather envisages the tragic repetition of his general types
of human action.
2001 [1944], p. 58). Money and markets thus extend society beyond its local core. This usually
entails changes in society, especially distribution (who gets what), for which money is central.
Polanyi distinguished between “token” and “commodity” forms of money. Token money was
designed to facilitate domestic trade; commodity money, foreign trade. Money was thus
not a commodity, it was purchasing power; far from having utility itself, it was merely a counter
embodying a quantified claim to things that could be purchased. Clearly, a society in which distribution
depended on possession of such tokens of purchasing power was a construction entirely different from
market economy. (Polanyi 2001 [1944], p. 196)
Polanyi (2001 [1944]) held that the utopian attempt to organize all social life as individualized
and impersonal market relations, for which nineteenth century Britain was the paradigmatic case,
generated the inequality and broken social ties that led to World War II (when he wrote his book).
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As society expanded through monetary relations, the tension between community and anonymity
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in economic transactions became intolerable. Markets had once been kept at arm’s length from
society, but they were now intrinsic to its internal functioning. The move to a welfare state was
part of this history, but it implied new forms of sociality that called into question the boundaries
separating inside society from its outside (Polanyi 2001 [1944]).
Polanyi, like Mauss, explored money’s constitutive role in framing the limits of sociality. He
did not take it to be a set of eternal functions (Polanyi 1977 [1964]), nor did he see it as establishing
the same power relations and social hierarchies across time and place. His vision was grounded in
a critique of market economy, in some ways similar to the Marxists’ approach. However, Polanyi
wanted to show how various monetary arrangements correspond to different social configurations
and that the current alliance between a powerful finance industry and nation-states must be seen
in this light, especially if we wish to transform it.
Rather than start, as economic liberals do, with a definition of money’s functions and an
ontology of the agents who use it, Mauss and Polanyi show how monetary relations are fundamental
to the definition of self and society in specific settings. These relations are potentially subversive, in
that they challenge social rules and hierarchies, even the boundaries of society. The perspective on
economy that prevails today represents our interdependent world’s contradictions as being largely
a conflict over credit and currency, but Mauss and Polanyi point to how anthropologists could
help shape humanity’s common future. In his postwar reincarnation as an American academic,
however, Polanyi (1957) settled for encouraging anthropologists to acquiesce in an academic
division of labor that limited us to parochial debates and exotic objects of study (Hann & Hart
2011). Although the anthropology of money and finance has been resurgent since the 1980s, we
are still struggling with this limitation.
processes and regional research (e.g., Guyer 2004), point to how the anthropology of money may
begin to redress this situation.
Few anthropologists today (Hart 2005a, Graeber 2011) seem to accept the myth of money’s
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origins that has entered Western folklore since Adam Smith (1961 [1776]) invented it. Individuals
exchanged things they had and others needed for what they needed and others had. Money made
the barter more efficient as a commodity that could be kept and would be widely accepted later.
This myth assumes that private property is primordial: All that is missing from primitive markets is
money. Some theorists since the nineteenth century have opposed a view of money as the creation
of the state to this focus on money as a product of individual exchange (Ingham 2004). They see
money as a means of payment (of taxes in particular) and as a standard measure of credit and debt.
Monetary policy after 1945 has swung violently between these two extremes.
Keith Hart (1986) suggested that coins are two-sided for the good reason that political authority
and market exchange are both indispensable to money. Money is both a credit token linking persons
in society (heads) and a measure of commodities circulating in impersonal markets (tails). David
Graeber (2001, 2009, 2011) links money to debt in a unique historical synthesis. The invention
of money 5,000 years ago allowed moral obligations to be given an impersonal measure. This
measure’s name was debt and violence was the midwife of its birth. World history since then has
seen money oscillate between two poles, virtual credit and currency, often in the form of coinage
made from precious metals.
Mauss and Polanyi saw money as a means of extending the economic reach of local societies that
generally aspired to self-sufficiency. In this sense, money and the markets it sustains are human
universals, although they take many forms different from those with which we are familiar. Polanyi
(1977 [1964]) noted that the modern form of money, national monopoly currencies (“all-purpose
money”), was invented in the mid-nineteenth century, and we now know that it has been unraveling
since the 1970s. Several anthropologists have noted in this context that state-building depends on
articulating domestic monetary policy with global financial flows (Maurer 2004, Neiburg 2006,
Peebles 2008, Holmes 2009).
Viviana Zelizer (1994), with whose work we are in substantial agreement, has shown that people
grant multiple meanings to money in the United States that cannot be grasped by either liberal
or statist theories. Money is central to relations with a high emotional content, such as buying
a child’s present, settling a divorce, or taking out life insurance. Social relations frame money’s
existence: It makes sense only as part of specific social identities; it articulates family ties (Zelizer
2005) and mediates life and death (Zelizer 1979).
This snapshot of the field indicates the pluralism of contemporary anthropological approaches
to money. There remains, however, the question of the ocean; but here too, we must escape from
the legacy of top-down world histories that tell just one story.
on Marxism (Gregory 1997, Harvey 2005). LiPuma & Lee (2004) studied the rise of deriva-
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tives in foreign exchange markets. Their framework, however, led them to consider these new
developments as simply another instance of financial capitalism’s encroachment (with its ficti-
tious money) on the rest of the world. Graeber’s (2011) book on debt covers the whole world
and many historical moments in a fashion that recalls Weber. He identifies three moral forms
of economic relations—everyday communism (sharing), exchange (reciprocity), and hierarchy
(inequality)—that are combined with varying emphasis throughout human history. Nevertheless,
echoing Marxist approaches and theories of the Great Divide, his universal history of money does
not sit easily with recent research showing how the uses and meanings of money in everyday life
are much more multiple and fluid than can be captured by any grand narrative, however encyclo-
pedic its sources. Drawing on Weber more explicitly, Arjun Appadurai (2012) has also recently
launched a project to reinvent social theory through studying the finance industry in terms of a
new “spirit of calculation” (2012), but this too is likely to run up against similar limits.
Financial professionals operate in a bureaucratic world, where they are expected to embody
the figure of the investor by following stringent and often contradictory rules (Clark & Thrift
2005). These rules routinely depart from the ideal of “freedom” of exchange that underpins
the neoliberal model (Zaloom 2006, Preda 2009, Ortiz 2014). The methods used for making
valuations and investments rest on intellectual traditions for which the theological notion of
infinity is central (Maurer 2002). Furthermore, positivist constructions of the relationship between
natural law and mathematics (De Goede 2005) are used to determine stock indexes or the “financial
value” of futures and credit derivatives (Tett 2009; Ortiz 2013a,b). The usefulness of probabilistic
models of risk has been questioned by Ayache (2010), following Meillassoux (2010), but these
still significantly shape the economy by being an essential part of everyday practice in the rating
agencies, for example (Ouroussoff 2010, MacKenzie 2011). Their adoption is not due to any
intrinsic cognitive clarity, which is largely absent (Knorr Cetina 2005, Knorr Cetina & Preda
2007, Lépinay 2011, Riles 2011). Rather, it depends in part on the strong links forged between
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academia and the finance industry during the late twentieth century, an alliance reinforced by
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so-called Nobel prizes awarded to economists who promoted the right message (Whitley 1986,
MacKenzie 2006).
None of this criticism appears to disturb the dominant liberal narrative, which continues to
shape the finance industry’s institutional practices, as Lucia Müller (2006) has shown for Brazil
and Karen Ho (2009) has for the United States. Indeed, far from being undermined by financial
failure, neoliberalism goes from strength to strength (Mirowski 2013). Even the notion of “financial
crisis” has been assimilated to this discourse (Ortiz 2012). Discussions over how prices would be
determined by the Euronext software, for example, hinged on whether it would reproduce the
true value expected by liberal theory (Muniesa 2000, 2007). Ellen Hertz’s (1998) pioneering study
showed that the Chinese middle classes embraced stock markets as a way for decentralized investors
to check state control. Eventually, however, they found themselves helpless in the face of “the
market,” allowing the state to retain much of its power.
Several anthropologists have shown that citizenship is shaped by the debates over monetary
policy (Hart 1986). The monetary policy that led to the US subprime mortgage crisis ( Jorion
2007) was based on identifying citizenship with home ownership, while hiding the economy’s
dependence on global credit. The idea that currencies are made by states is contradicted by
many studies of proliferating monetary instruments produced by other bodies, which include
complementary currencies with transnational circulation. Other examples are Islamic practices
opposed to conventional finance and currencies that simply differ from legal tender (Zelizer 1998,
Maurer 2005b, Hart 2006).
question: How might each person’s everyday experience of money be related to massive global
inequalities in the distribution of money? Any conclusions must simultaneously draw on several
processes that compete with and influence each other. Nigel Dodd (2005, 2014) agrees: Only
by approaching money as a labile social relation with rules that change can we address money’s
multiplicity at the global level, seeing it as a product of several histories that join and part in an
increasingly interconnected world.
Jane Guyer (2004) has demonstrated how this can be done in practice, thereby opening up new
methodological horizons for the study of money. On the basis of long-term participant observation
and archival research, she shows that Atlantic Africans developed a plural framework for commerce,
where social rank, multiple scales of monetary valuation, and circuits of exchange intersect and
diverge. Her historical analysis takes in indigenous developments, reactions to imperialism, and
global economic ties after independence. Guyer contrasts this flexible regional culture with the
reductive oversimplifications of economic historians and the parochialism of local ethnographers.
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She has subsequently extended her reach to include monetary practices in the contemporary
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United States and British economic history (Guyer 2010, 2012). In the process, she finds that the
European sailors and traders who first encountered Atlantic Africa brought with them commercial
practices that were closer to the indigenous model than to any that we have later imputed to them.
Guyer’s outstanding achievement is that she can describe and explain how new monetary relations
are created without resorting to a single overarching narrative of what money is.
[They] are not so much two human sciences among others, but they span the entire domain of those
sciences, they animate its whole surface . . . [They] are ‘counter-sciences’; which does not mean that
they are less ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that
they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly ‘unmake’ that very man
who is creating and recreating his positivity in the human sciences. (Foucault 1973 [1966], p. 379)
At the same time, however, to connect with the world, anthropologists must reach out beyond
their own immediate observations. As a result, anthropologists have developed new methods of
research in recent decades, following the global circulation of particular objects (Appadurai 1986)
or advocating multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995). Here, we highlight some possible ways for
an anthropology of money and finance to connect minute field observations to world society and
history.
in 1971 (Galbraith 1975, Eichengreen 1996, Hart 2012). “National capitalism” (Hart 2009) is the
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modern synthesis of the nation-state and industrial capitalism, the institutional attempt to manage
money, markets, and accumulation through central bureaucracy within a cultural community of
national citizens. The nation-state has dominated thinking about society since the mid-nineteenth
century—even though society has long been leaking across its boundaries—and money is its most
powerful symbol. Nevertheless, the “noncontractual element in the contract” (Durkheim 1960
[1893]) is no longer sustained by national frameworks alone. The single-currency model of na-
tional economy is being extended to become a more plural or federal assemblage, thereby creating
new forms of inclusion and conflict. Regional associations, whatever the limitations of their design,
are already a step in this direction. International financial institutions search for a new Bretton
Woods, whereas the Beijing Consensus challenges the Washington Consensus in a multipolar
geopolitics, and bottom-up approaches to building world institutions claim afresh their share of
the overall political design (Pleyers 2010).
National governments are being sidelined by international and regional organizations, such
as ASEAN, the Chiang Mai agreements supporting foreign exchange stability in East Asia, Mer-
cosul, or the European Union with its eurozone. East African governments are discussing a tax
union to deal with Chinese trade. United Nations bodies, the International Monetary Fund, the
World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Organization of Securities
Commissions all still claim to derive their legitimacy from nation-states. Yet, in their specific areas
of competence, they initiate a global network of decision making that no single state can control.
National governments are enmeshed in symbiotic and conflicting relations with corporations
and global financial institutions. Global corporations, called transnational because of their ambigu-
ous allegiance to state-made laws, articulate money flows that defy regulation by any government.
They create their own monetary instruments (Zelizer 1994), and while retaining limited liability
for debts, they benefit from the legal rights and moral personhood accorded individual citizens,
despite their much greater wealth, power, and longevity (Hart 2005b). They are redrawing the
concept of citizenship around the world. Anthropologists have been slow to grasp the dynamics
of a world economy where these corporations seek to control all economic phases from research
and development, production, regulation, distribution, and marketing to household consumption
(Applbaum 2004).
If fieldwork-based knowledge is always haunted by the limits to what one person can observe
in a given time and place, this is even more the case with the study of money. When it comes
to money and finance, whatever we study is part of exchange networks that go far beyond the
limits of our observations. The extent of markets is often unknowable and beyond effective local
control. Not only do social interactions proliferate beyond our gaze, but so too do the concepts and
narratives that people use to make sense of them. Studies of money and finance are often confined
to a trading room in a bank, a neighborhood where street transactions occur, or a company where
salaries are paid and goods and services sold. We can begin to connect these settings to the wider
processes of which they are part if we “follow the money.”
Monetary transactions often link a variety of organizations (states, companies, associations,
churches, credit networks, etc.) whose rules are in turn written and unwritten, explicit and im-
plicit. These come into play whenever a company pays salaries and taxes; when a state creates an
independent central bank that establishes interest rates, prints money, and collects taxes; when
wages enter local credit networks; or in any act of buying and selling on the street. Because multi-
sited ethnography cannot capture money’s endless circulation, we must find other methods to
trace these connections. In this process, it becomes obvious that money’s meanings and the social
identities that they generate belong to a broader and more complex reality. When a mother buys a
toy for her child, using her banked salary, they are linked to global finance and to the global circuit
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of goods and services in which the toy producer and the mother’s employer also take part. Even
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street transactions outside the banking system connect people to commercial networks, state-made
money, and global finance in ways that extend far beyond their neighborhoods.
How people imagine gender, age, citizenship, class, ethnicity, or locality is played out through
money and finance; each time it is enacted and transformed in situations observed by the ethno-
grapher. Monetary connections can be explored through interviews as well as by entering into a
dialogue with other specialists. Anthropologists must read about macroeconomic developments,
examine monetary flows, and engage critically with analyses of the finance industry. If we shy away
from these avenues to learning about money, our field observations will become detached from
global debates to which anthropology could make a crucial contribution.
monopoly currency, is routinely contrasted with the rest who must adopt the “modern” model by
means of colonization or rationalization (Hart 2000, Guyer 2004). Nevertheless, anthropologists
have shown that state formation in Caribbean offshore islands requires them to adopt a form of
sovereignty that remains open to global financial flows (Maurer 2004), whereas the Chinese state
seeks to control its citizens through regulating participation in financial markets (Hertz 1998).
By placing fieldwork observations within a framework of global comparison, anthropologists can
promote different views of the state and its relation to money.
Too often, anthropologists acknowledge the centrality of history but leave it out of their
descriptions and analyses. Thus, even when analyzing colonial relations, the contributors to Parry
& Bloch (1989) assume the global context away to concentrate on their local objects of study.
Global networks usually appear in ethnographies of finance, if at all, only as an implicit abstraction.
As with media accounts of the financial crisis, most ethnographers conflate local events with “the
world” (Ortiz 2012). Labeling everything “neoliberalism” is likewise a poor substitute for studying
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world economy.
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It is therefore important to connect fieldwork observations with the history of the economic
and political categories used by people in a given place. If we want to understand their different
uses, we also need to link these ideas to the history of institutions and organizations, such as states,
corporations, or the academy. In this way, we can develop a reflexive critique of monetary and
financial practices, both in the data we highlight and in our own discipline. What were the questions
asked by those whose analytical categories we adopt? Do we want to ask similar questions? Do they
help us to connect local situations to their global context, or do we need to invent new concepts?
(Zelizer 1998, Maurer 2005b, Hart 2006). An exclusive focus on national currencies misses how
these experiments open windows onto global distribution. In the past 20 years, money has been
reshaped by the technological means of its production and circulation. New economic relations
and forces have emerged, and new circuits of distribution and exclusion have been created.
Anthropology is bound to change in this context. In the 1960s, the discipline confronted the
collapse of colonial empires but knew nothing of personal computers and the Internet. By the
1990s, anthropologists saw the Internet as a “new technology of communication,” while strug-
gling to figure out what it meant to live without the Cold War. Members of Generation Y who
have grown up in the rich areas of the world may only vaguely recall a time when life did not
take place through social media and financial crisis was not a permanent feature of politics. In
their Introduction to Digital Anthropology (Horst & Miller 2012), “The Digital and the Human:
A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology,” the editors argue for an affinity between digital worlds
and money (Hart 2000). It seems clear that the objects and methods of anthropological study
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2014.43:465-482. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
of both fields are likely to converge. Tom Boellstorff ’s (2012) review chapter makes the striking
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observation that the anthropology of digital worlds is particularly suited to the method of partic-
ipant observation. This is partly because those who have grown up with the new technologies are
more open to learning pragmatically through virtual social interaction than to relying on technical
manuals. We must learn to observe and analyze new social identities and patterns of relationships
in the spaces created by today’s means of communication. In doing so, anthropologists can learn
from and help shape new ways of imagining the world of money.
The object of anthropology, following Kant, could be the making of world society or the human
universal. One word for this is humanity, at once a collective noun, a moral quality, and a historical
project for our species. This ethical horizon of the anthropological endeavor is what helps us to
reach for the minutiae of other people while trying to span the gap between their local specificity
and the global connections in which they take part. As Mauss recognized, the notion of society
is reshaped by this multifarious expansion. If we hope for a more peaceful and integrated world
society, money will certainly play an important role in its formation. For fieldwork to be useful
to this end, it must be liberated from the limits of direct observation. Interdisciplinary dialogue is
also vital, but it may not be enough. We have to rid ourselves of the delusion that positive methods
are the only way anthropologists can generate valuable knowledge. The best anthropology has
always been based on extension from concrete observations to the imagination of more inclusive
social worlds. The study of money would be impossible without such extension. Indeed, money is
the prime example of this process. Once we extend our gaze to the horizon, anthropologists will
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2014.43:465-482. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that
might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research by H.O. has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC Stg-Gt 263529).
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Annual Review of
Anthropology
Perspectives
Looking Back, Looking Ahead
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Jane H. Hill p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 1
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AN43-FrontMatter ARI 3 September 2014 17:5
Transnational Humanitarianism
Miriam Ticktin p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 273
Informed Consent: The Politics of Intent and Practice in Medical
Research Ethics
Klaus Hoeyer and Linda F. Hogle p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 347
Ethnographies of Encounter
Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 363
Health, Risk, and Resilience: Interdisciplinary Concepts and
Applications
Catherine Panter-Brick p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 431
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World History
Keith Hart and Horacio Ortiz p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 465
Theme 1: Risk
Secrecy
Graham M. Jones p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p53
On the Verge of Death: Visions of Biological Vulnerability
Carlo Caduff p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 105
Sexual Violence and Its Discontents
Pratiksha Baxi p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 139
The Ethnography of Prisons and Penal Confinement
Manuela Cunha p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 217
Informed Consent: The Politics of Intent and Practice in Medical
Research Ethics
Klaus Hoeyer and Linda F. Hogle p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 347
Imitation
Michael Lempert p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 379
Health, Risk, and Resilience: Interdisciplinary Concepts and
Applications
Catherine Panter-Brick p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 431
Theme 2: Knowledge
Primate Taxonomy: Inflation or Real?
Colin P. Groves p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p27
On the Verge of Death: Visions of Biological Vulnerability
Carlo Caduff p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p 105
Contents ix
AN43-FrontMatter ARI 3 September 2014 17:5
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